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Indoor air pollution and respiratory health in the elderly

¹ Pulmonary Environmental Epidemiology Group, CNR Institute of Clinical Physiology, Pisa, Italy, ² Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland

CORRESPONDENCE: L. Carrozzi, CNR Institute of Clinical Physiology, Via Trieste, 41, 56126 Pisa, Italy. Fax: 39 050503596. E-mail: carrozzl@ifc.cnr.it

Keywords: elderly, indoor pollution, lung function, passive smoking, respiratory symptoms

Received: April 12, 2002
People spend about 80–90% of their daily time indoors, elderly people especially at home. Thus, it is important to investigate possible health effects of indoor air pollutants and to consider their contributions to the total human exposure.

This report summarises current knowledge on health effects of three common indoor air pollutants, respirable suspended particles, nitrogen dioxide and environmental tobacco smoke, with focus on the adults and the elderly. Preliminary findings on exposure distributions and health effects of these pollutants in older subjects of two panel studies carried out in Italian general populations will also be reported.

The two indoor pollution studies were performed in the Po Delta area in North Italy (428 subjects and 140 houses investigated) and in Pisa in Central Italy (761 subjects and 282 houses investigated). Individuals aged 65 yrs spent a significantly larger number of hours at home than the other age groups both in winter and in summer. A trend of higher occurrence of acute respiratory symptoms in the presence of environmental tobacco smoke was shown in comparison to the unexposed elderly both in winter (31 versus 29%) and summer (33 versus 16%). The occurrence of acute respiratory symptoms was consistently higher in relation to the high respirable suspended particles-index exposure compared to low exposure (33 versus 27% in winter, 27 versus 21% in summer). Both the presence of environmental tobacco smoke at home and exposure to the high respirable suspended particles-index were associated with a decrease in the mean daily peak expiratory flow.